The Urban Stories workshop targets filmmakers: professionals, semi-professionals and students. It will explore the structure and the interactions afforded by the emerging medium of location-aware mobile devices. These are systems capable of selectively presenting media to an audience who is out and about, engaged and interacting with a dynamic urban environment. The distinguishing quality of this media format is its powerful ability to deliver narrative experiences that merge with an audience´s physical context – the environment immediately surrounding them. However, it is also experienced on small screens and viewed in conditions with varying light and sound pollution. Furthermore, structuring narratives into fragmented segments distributed spatially and temporally presents new challenges to conventional story-telling practices. This workshop will explore the balance among these constraints. Its participants will be guided through the process of producing as well designing interactions for mobile, spatially distributed narratives. Working in pairs they will be given a loose fictional narrative plotted around the barbers shops of the city of Porto. The processes of producing the story in multimedia format and design the interactions around the specific story experience, will be tutored to suit presentation on mobile devices. The workshop will culminate with a walking tour and public exhibition showing the stories in context.

Learn how to stream through the web from mobile locations and learn to use this new knowledge to engage in the practice of collaborative, disperse radio.

Bertoldt Brecht asked for a Radio that could work as a listening and sending device but things worked out differently. Regulatory needs under political and military motivations rendered Radio a broadcast medium where passive listening is the rule and access restricted.

Then enter the digital platforms, with open rules of access/content and Brecht ideas can come to fruition. Listening and broadcasting can be done in the same apparatus, the computer. And the computer is the gateway and tool to re-think radio and expand its possibilities. This workshop addresses the two questions that remain: “How to do it in practice” and then, “What to do with it”.

Recently, entire communities have been springing up for distributed experiments and production of knowledge, exchanging ideas and information amongst amateurs, professionals and academics in all kinds of disciplines. The gates have been opened for “citizen science”, in which neighbors can organize not just the management and development of knowledge, but also its application in decision-making and re-designing the public agenda. They can open wide-ranging debates on town planning, environmental, cultural, education or technology policies developed by governments and have a significant impact on how local politics work or the living conditions in the local neighborhood? Neighborhood Science digs into this subject, expanding the scope of the projects and involving a broader population. The proposal is to set up small urban experimental laboratories to channel and foster neighborhood participation based on experience, on the passion for learning and sharing that is characteristic of amateur and hacker culture, and on the possibility of taking control over the resolution of problems that affect and link together worldwide “communities of concern”. We’d like to start moving citizen science out of the garage/prototype stage and onto the street, finding ways to move beyond the typical activist and hacker communities and into the lives of everyday friends, families, and neighbors.

In recent years, CCSTOP, a bankrupt shopping mall in Porto, has largely become a network of musicians who have rented the former shops and turned them into rehearsal rooms. But in reality, CCSTOP is also the space of other activities: a handful of shop owners remain, technicians, a few bars, a danceteria, video makers, a seamstress, a beautician… Since 2008, futureplaces has been trying to help foster the community of musicians in their potential to innovate and regenerate public spaces, musical forms and narratives. But it would be a mistake to forget or alienate all these other agents, whose expertise could and should be taken into account in this search for a reinvention of CCSTOP as a cultural lab.

This workshop proposes two days of experimentation in cross-breeding between the multiple areas of expertise of the inhabitants of CCSTOP. It is an opportunity to not only cross heavy metal and jazz, electronica and dub, but to also consider the rhythmic work patterns of the seamstress as music, the beautician as a provider of innovative styles for musicians, the antique shop as a space for music memorabilia, far beyond the dead end of a Hard Rock Café.

This will be a hands-on workshop where participants are expected to develop a musical application with the help of trainers. Instead of real stringed instruments or percussion, each Android device will participate, in line with each other, as an element of an orchestra. For this purpose, we will use some of Android’s libraries, and communicate between the devices and a remote server. For the user interface we will use not only the native Android layouts but also WebViews for the purspose of demonstrating the possibility of mixing native code with Web technologies (HTML / CSS / Javascript).

At the end of this training, participants are expected to be able to produce a working Android application and enough knowledge to pursue more advanced Android topics.